Sunday, August 24, 2014

Starting Over

How random our lives are. How we can be born on a whim of chance, a
loneliness in the heart, a hunger to be somewhere else. I have become very
aware of this as I try to attune myself to the cold fact that my husband and I
will be long-distance grandparents.Before the summer is over our first and only grandchild will have moved
to the United States
with her Irish mother and American father to start her new little life. And so
it puts me in mind of my own lineage. How this precious part of us would never
have been born if my forebears hadn’t crossed the Atlantic.

At a time when the Erris peninsula was anything but
‘the best place to go wild in’ as it has just been voted, my great-grandparents
and six of their children emigrated from the shores of Belmullet in June, 1883
on the SS Waldensian, bound for Boston.
This was the third steamer that year to leave BlacksodBay
under the assisted Emigration Arrears Act.

The project was funded by the Tuke Fund, named after a
Yorkshire Quaker, James Hack Tuke who spent most of his life trying to relieve
the starvation and poverty in the west of Ireland. His scheme granted passage
to large numbers of tenant farmers and their families from the most deprived
areas of Ireland
willing to seek a new life beyond the pinched existence of post-Famine Mayo. My
great-grandparents chose to do this, handing their hungry piece of grass back
to the landlord, packing up whatever little possessions they had and set their
sights on America.
In all, 3,300 people left those shores between 1883−84.

A fine morning by all accounts. Late June, the weather clement as they
followed the winding road down to the sea, the S.S. Waldensian waiting for them
in the calm waters of EllyBay.No need for tears, they were going as a unit
and it was still too early for anyone to wave them off.

And maybe they were glad to see the back of it all,
the smell of rotting, the wind-crippled trees, the last smoor of a cold fire.
For their passage was paid; they had clothes on their backs. The women given a
second set of petticoats, dress, a bonnet, a brush and comb; the men an
overcoat, two shirts, a muffler, six pounds in their pockets: landing money. The anchor was raised and the SS Waldensian set sail.

According to the passenger list they landed in BostonHarbour
on 4th July 1883. What a New World
celebration they would have arrived into: flags flying, brass bands, speeches,
fanfares, How delighted they would have been to think it was for them alone, a
welcome to the land of plenty where the streets were paved with gold, no
comparison with the scatter of stones that they had abandoned.

They moved to Rhode
Island where my great-grandfather was given work in a
manufacturing company. A swanky home by their standards, steady work, a school
for the children, another baby born, a child christened.

But after the first flush of excitement, they couldn’t
settle. And who is to say what brought them back? Whether it was all those
factory chimney stacks blocking out the sky, no burnished sand of Elly Bay,
no sight of geese on Iniskea, no curlew.
Either way, against the tide they bought a return passage on a ship still
marked with famine and headed back, one of the young girls dying onboard. She
was kept hidden in her mother’s shawl until they landed in Cobh
where they buried her. Which road they took to find their way back to Belmullet
is lost with them but they started over; picked up the pieces.

How
different this life narrative would have been if they had stayed. Who would
have married who? Who would have begotten who? Only that my grandmother would
not have met her husband at the August Fair Day in Belmullet, my mother, I, my
daughter, and now our granddaughter would not have entered this earth.

And
so the story repeats itself. Not a boat but a plane, not famine but
opportunity, not my ancestors but my own, daughter, her husband, their child,
our granddaughter.Beginning a new life.
Starting over.

About Geraldine Mills

A native of Galway, Geraldine is a poet and short story writer with four collections of poetry and three of short fiction. Arlen House has published her short fiction collections, Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The Weight of Feathers(2007) and her most recent collection 'Hellkite' which are available internationally from www.kennys.ie and Syracuse University Press and have been taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University. Her poetry collections include 'Unearthing your Own' (2001) and 'Toil the Dark Harvest' (2004) which were published by Bradshaw Books, Cork. 'An Urgency of Stars' published by Arlen House, 2010 was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. Arlen House was also the publisher of 'The Other Side of Longing', a collaboration with U.S. poet Lisa C.Taylor which was the Gerson Reading choice for the University of Connecticut April 2010.
Geraldine is a mentor with NUI Galway and an online tutor with Creative Writing Ink. Her first children's novel titled 'Gold' has just been published by Little Island. It is suitable for children 9+.